They are an agency who "sell" employees to clients. They are not an employer. "Crossover has developed a unique method of finding, curating, and managing remote contractors."
– DavidPostillFeb 29 '16 at 11:36

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@DavidPostill, thanks. I still feel that Careers should be doing more to protect their brand. Especially when you compare to the quality control that goes into questions on SO. I flagged a job announcement last week with two typos in the first sentence. That doesn't inspire confidence in the company OR in Careers.
– BenjolFeb 29 '16 at 13:14

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I'm inclined to agree, and can't see how accepting postings from Crossover is doing anything but harm to the Stack Overflow Careers brand. The improbably inflated salaries offered as a lure by Crossover, coupled with their claim that their engineers are "the Illuminati of tech talent" (a shady secret society? Great!) do nothing to inspire my confidence. If the ads cannot be adequately policed, then I would welcome some means of filtering companies as suggested by dbronner.
– umbrielMar 4 '16 at 14:06

@bejol fwiw my experience with career's team has been stellar in terms of highlighting misleading ads and the removal of these pre-the jobs tab on SO. Maybe they are just getting overwhelmed ever since careers morphed into the jobs tab on SO.
– Burhan KhalidMar 9 '16 at 7:06

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"They are an agency who "sell" employees to clients" - so a body shop. Generally bad news all around.
– Ian KempMar 18 '16 at 7:25

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@DavidPostill - "curating" remote contractors? "Curating"? So they're in charge of exhibiting them?!? "Here, behind the glass, we see the dreaded Remote Software Engineer in his native environment. Be careful, madame - don't get too close! They might charge. If we listen carefully we might hear them communicating... 'C'! 'Java'! 'C!' 'JAVA!' "Sometimes they go on like that for hours. No, little girl, no one understands what it means - but very smart scientists are trying to figure that out. Now, if you would, please direct your attention upwards - there's a dozing Manager in this tree..."
– Bob Jarvis - Reinstate MonicaMar 22 '16 at 1:30

@DeerHunter, yeah I saw that. Interestingly there is a (deleted) answer on that question from the founder of Crossover. Not sure why it go zapped (possibly because it's a copy-paste of an answer on Quora).
– BenjolMar 23 '16 at 10:03

2 Answers
2

This is not strictly an answer to the question of the OP, so I apologize in advance for that. I'm going to tell my personal experience since I think it can be helpful for the rest of the community. I applied for an engineering position in Crossover.

The first phase was a test on Hackerrank. Nothing difficult to pass, although I wouldn't say the quality of the questions was specially high. The second phase was an assignment with a time limit of 3 days. That was difficult, but I managed to make it work quite decently.
After that, they called me couple of times to set a personal interview where we would review the assignment, and I was supposed to receive an offer after that.

During all the process I received absolutely zero information about the company, work, salary conditions... However, they indeed called me several times to rush me to take the second phase, and after that to do the interview as soon as possible. I can say it was my bad, because I went through the selection process without a proper research of the company.

If you read their webpage everything gets a bit clearer. You don't know if you would work for them or for some other company (although you will be paid by them), they claim to pay you by transfer every month (paying taxes and paperwork is on you) and I was not even sure whether I would need to sign a contract with them.

When I read that I was totally sure I would not work like this, even though working remotely and with the technologies they worked seemed appealing. In the end, I found another job 40 minutes drive from home where my salary is almost double of what they offered, so I just politely refused to go through the personal interview.

In abstract, they seem to be a company that sells workers to other companies. They hire people from poor countries and sell them to American companies (I guess). The working conditions, I prefer not to imagine how they are. My personal piece of advice, unless your country is really f***** and you enjoy playing the Russian roulette, don't even think about applying there.

Thanks for asking (and apologies for the slow reply, this one got away...)!

We do have a quality control process in place: the sales, customer support, and customer success teams tend to work quite closely with our clients to ensure the listings meet our standards. But we don't always catch everything, and in those cases we rely on the flagging functionality on the jobs, and on Meta to bring things to our attention.

With regards to this particular case, we'll look into this and report back.

Update

We've been working with the company, and will continue to do so, on their listings and company page, to clarify how they work.

The main issue here as I see it is targeting. These jobs will be of interest to some, and not to others, and making sure that we show them to the right people will go a long way in resolving these issues. Based on the comments below we did identify an issue that meant these jobs were actually shown to the EU, and are working on fixing this.

I've read up a bit since, and Crossover definitely seems like a tough call. It's not an out-and-out scam, I think, but definitely seems more attractive to 'third world' (if that's still an allowed term) developers, for whom the money is sufficient incentive to pass on the (to me) ridiculous strictures of being overseen via webcam.
– BenjolMar 18 '16 at 6:03

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@benjol these jobs might not be for everyone, but at the same time, they could be of huge interest to many developers. The challenge is the wording and targeting, which we continue to work on. Speaking of the latter, would you mind telling me where you're based? These ads are targeted to exclude the EU and US.
– Korneel BoumanMar 18 '16 at 13:52

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Right in the middle of the EU, but not in the EU ;)
– BenjolMar 18 '16 at 14:04

@Benjol Ha! Clever :) Still, you shouldn't have been shown the ads... Going to ping to off site if you don't mind, have one or two more questions.
– Korneel BoumanMar 18 '16 at 15:42

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So users here generate the content, do quality control on the content, that work generates page views, page views get converted into ads that company profits from, ads target the people generating and maintaining the content for free, and the people being targeted are relied on to work also for free on maintaining the quality of the ads. SE has it made.
– user562566Mar 21 '16 at 8:44

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@Benjol: If these ads are supposed to be targeted, then SO's targeting logic is horrible. I'm right in the middle of the EU and still seeing these ads...
– anderasMar 21 '16 at 14:38

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As discussed previously on Meta, the geo-location on Careers is not taking into account modern concepts such as remote data centres or bandwidth savers. In the UK I get regularly served ads from the US, Switzerland or from location at least 100 miles away. This issue has been reported to and acknowledged by SO years ago and therefore you can't rely on ads not being served outside the intended target area. From both a legal and brand perception point of view, you simply have to assume these ads are visible by users other than the target audience.
– AlexMar 22 '16 at 15:27

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This company has been outed by the users quite a while ago. You may want to keep their account, but the reputation of SO will suffer thus endangering its long-term survival prospects.
– Deer HunterMar 23 '16 at 7:20

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I see the ads too (firmly in the EU, but pretty far down south. And in a place with awful unemployment rates.) Please dump these guys, SO careers
– PekkaApr 8 '16 at 16:58

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From the Netherlands, the sidebar was filled with 4 ads by them. Since you seem to work as some kind of contractor (under Dutch law) and they offer 30k USD this is close to the minimum salary. As a bonus, you suffer exchange rate risk. Please remove them.
– Bob JansenApr 25 '16 at 16:17

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I live in Sweden (which is definitely part of the EU) and today 3/4 sidebar ads were from Crossover. So something seems really funky with the geolocation stuff. Not using any vpn, bandwidth-savers or anything, my external ip is located in the correct city by all tested services.
– Karl-Johan SjögrenMay 4 '16 at 6:51

Geo-location is definitely broken for them. I get their ad typically along with 3/4 properly geo-targetted ads. And those other ads will pay about 90k+ USD, so it's not like anyone benefits here.
– MSaltersMay 4 '16 at 7:51

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So given that nothing has happened here (except maybe that we first-worlders are now spared the icky sight a bit more effectively), I'm reaching the conclusion that the bottom line here is "we're going to show this only in failed states where people are desperate enough to consider applying even though there is overwhelming evidence this is a super sleazy business". Good to know where your priorities lie, SO.
– PekkaJul 18 '16 at 20:31

@Pekka웃 As long as there are failed states and people desperate enough to consider sweatshop jobs, I don't see anything dastardly here. If SE doesn't advertise them, someone else will. People just need to know beforehand what they're getting themselves into - that's the real problem here.
– ivan_pozdeevSep 29 '17 at 20:12